Well, California law requires a lottery to determine the order of candidates on the ballot. Why does this law exist? Studies of the primacy effect showed the candidate at the top of the ballot gains as much as a 5% increase in votes. Consequently, in 1975, California legislators adopted a law mandating an end to the alphabetical listing of candidates (likely to the chagrin of Sam Aanestad and Dick Ackerman but the joy of Mary Young and Ed Zschau) and requiring a lottery before each election.

The Secretary of State’s candidate order lottery has determined the alphabet for the June primary to be UNADIVXWQGOZLTRKSJHMCBFPYE.

This applies to most races on the ballot, excluding races that cross county lines (for OC, these would be CD-38, CD-39, CD-47, CD-49, SD-29, and AD-55).

The primacy effect is weaker when there are fewer candidates on the ballot, and when there are higher-profile campaigns. Being at the top of the ballot is most valuable for low-profile campaigns with large numbers of candidates. That means that of the 19 people I listed above, the biggest winners in this lottery are the Central Committee candidates, so the biggest congratulations goes to the following Republican Central Committee Candidates for their 5% vote bonus:

55th Assembly District: Curt Hagman (R), Member of the State Assembly (1st of 2)

You would think that with electronic voting now, the names could be randomized for every poll voter (obviously, we’d still need the lottery for absentee voters).

(In the interest of full disclosure, my day job is working for Assemblyman Chris Norby, one of the lottery winners, as the letter N came in second in the alphabet behind U, though no one with a last name starting with U is running in all of Orange County.)

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[…] 2-9 for each identically named candidate. We already do a ballot order lottery in California to randomize the alphabet, so it would make sense to have a random number assigned to identically-named candidates. The […]